I have decided to start a blog.

I have long considered starting one, but I never really knew what to write about. It often feels like every problem in tech has already been adequately explained on some other fellow’s blog in words better than I can manage.

However, I have realized that this isn’t always the case. Many times, I have to do several Google searches before I can figure a problem out. Sometimes, after spending several hours dancing the Google dance and scouring the internet, I cobble together a solution to a problem that actually isn’t described on anyone’s blog. It is those solutions, I have realized, that I can write about. Certainly, anyone with a brain could work the problem out himself, but by keeping a blog, I might save future Googlers some time.

I have also found that writing helps me keep track of problems that I have solved and helps give other people a better feel for the kind of stuff I spend my time on. I always struggle with the interview questions that go “tell me about some challenges you faced on this project” or “what are the hardest bugs you have dealt with” because I have an unfortunate tendency to forget what I’ve done as soon as I start working on the next thing that comes my way. Yeah! I dunno, I… I found that one variable reference that I misspelled? This blog can serve as a record of some of the things I have worked on, and I need only read what I’ve written to refresh my mind. (On a loosely related note, this Quora thread has some truly entertaining debugging stories.)

Perhaps my biggest objection to blogging was that I didn’t feel I had enough time for it. This is, as it happens, still an objection. I plan on writing when I get a chance, but this blog is as much an experiment as anything else.

I am giving Jekyll and Octopress 3 a shot, although I might experiment with other platforms later. In the interest of getting this off the ground, I am sticking with the default Octopress theme (much to the horror of the perfectionist me), which is actually not bad at all. So, now I have a blog. Voila!